The St. Louis Gun Rights Examiner takes a look at the permission to carry vs. rights. My $0.02 is that he's right. We are doing it wrong. Folks like to hold up Indiana as some gun rights Mecca when it's really not even close compared to other states. When I lived in KY I could and did carry a firearm with me in my vehicles to where ever I wanted to go, range, store, etc. Do that here and you're a criminal. We don't have rights in Indiana. We have a privilege that we pay to exercise.
Read the rest at the source.Toward the end of Monday's column, I made an observation about the licensing of defensive handgun carry:
Another reason I rarely approach gun rights advocacy from this angle is that I don't believe in licensing the carrying of a firearm. In submitting to a licensing requirement to carry a firearm, we undermine our own case--that the keeping and bearing of arms is a Constitutionally guaranteed, fundamental human rightAs gun rights advocates, we argue that the Second Amendment exists to protect an inalienable right--one, indeed, that shall not be infringed. At the same time, though, we have endeavored to persuade the states (successfully, in the vast majority of states) to allow us to ask for (and pay for) a license to carry with us the means to defend our lives and our families. Our "success," in other words, has taken the form of reducing the bearing of arms from a fundamental right, to a privilege.
In asking for that privilege, we have lent implicit legitimacy to the denial of that which we should demand as free citizens. Yes--I know that most states have "shall issue" permitting systems, rather than "may issue," meaning that an applicant who meets the requirements for issuance of a license cannot, in theory, be denied the license. Sure--that's better than giving some police chief or sheriff the power to arbitrarily require someone to be defenseless while in public, but it still is an acceptance that our rights are something granted by government authority, based on our meeting the conditions the government imposes. Does that sound like "shall not be infringed" to you? In only two states, Vermont and Alaska, can citizens legally carry a concealed handgun without first asking permission.
In recent correspondence with a friend, he told me about being arrested decades ago for carrying a handgun without a permit (permits, of course, being impossible for "regular people" to obtain back then). At that time, though, carrying a gun without a government-issued permission slip was, in most jurisdictions, a misdemeanor. He pointed out to me that now, though, our "progress" has brought us to the point where illegally carrying a firearm is (again, in most jurisdictions) a felony, requiring, by federal law, the denial of one's ability to so much as (legally) touch a firearm--for life.